Winding Barrier Separates Friends

Sense Of Hope Among Neighbors Fades

January 10, 2005|Story by Tim Collie, Staff Writer

ELKANA, West Bank — When Ted Plavin moved to this Jewish settlement in 1989, residents warned that he was living too close to Arabs. A Palestinian man lived right behind his unfinished home, built on the remains of a Jordanian military outpost used during the Six-Day War of 1967.

But that Palestinian, Hani Amer, whom Plavin describes as a mensch -- Yiddish for "good fellow"-- turned out to be a good neighbor. He insisted that Plavin, an Orthodox Jew, share his electricity through a line run from his home. Later, Plavin ran a phone line from his house to the Palestinian's home.

These days, running any kind of a line between the neighbors' homes is more complicated. It would have to be strung through one fence, and then another to reach Amer's home, which is encircled by three fences, barbed wire and a 20-foot wall.

The odd structure, part of Israel's massive security fence separating Israel from the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank, runs between Plavin's settlement, Elkana, and the nearby Arab village of Masha. But instead of simply leaving Amer on one side, the structure encloses his house in what he calls a "cage" between Jews on one side and Palestinians on the other.

In the process, it has turned him into an unwitting symbol of the anger and alienation that Israelis and Palestinians feel toward each other. A sense of hope buoyed by promises of peace in the 1990s has been lost after four years of terrorism. Whether leaders on both sides can resurrect it with bold new moves is an open question. Up and down the fence line, people once linked through business, neighborhood and even friendship are being forced to choose sides.

"We all got along. I had no problem with the Jews, and I think they'll speak well of me, too," said Amer, 47, of the days before the fence was erected. "This is all such a big mess. There used to be peace here, business. Now it looks like a war zone. My business is destroyed. My children are nervous wrecks. I have the Israeli army guarding me in this cage like I'm a prisoner."

The man he still considers a friend, who used to sip sweet tea with him on Sunday afternoons, seems just as sad. The Palestinian lives so close to the Jews that he can look into the bedrooms of settlement homes from his second-floor porch.

"Do we still see each other? No, we can't," said Plavin, an American-born banker who has lived in Israel since 1973. "I can only shout through the fence if I wanted to.

"It's absurd. It's ridiculous. It's all the result of terrorism. They [the Palestinians] were doing so beautifully that if there was no partition, and we were to live together, one day it would have been one people indistinguishable."

Four years into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has cost about 4,500 lives -- at least 1,000 Israeli, and 3,500 Palestinian -- that notion seems further from realization than at any other time in the century-old struggle between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs.

While conflict and bloodshed have long plagued the West Bank, relations between Israelis and Palestinians have been more complex. Jews like Plavin and Arabs like Amer once shared an understanding that certain values applied in life, business and politics. Israelis and Palestinians were separate and unequal, but both seemed to be moving ahead, despite their differences.

That sense of upward mobility has been destroyed by four years of terrorism and military reprisal, and sealed with the construction of a wall that has radically altered life in places like Elkana and Masha.

"I think you'll find many isolated instances of Israelis and Palestinians who were quite close before the terror began, just like you found in Elkana," said Mark Medin, Florida regional director of the Anti-Defamation League. "There were close economic relationships, close friendships.

"And I'm sure there still are good relationships in many instances, but if you're an Israeli and if you have a realistic fear that you're going to be burned alive or raped if you enter a Palestinian village, relations are going to suffer. These settlements have to focus on security now, and that limits relations."

But some local Palestinian-Americans think the fence only aggravates the deep and complex relations between Arabs and Jews.

"It's crazy, because I meet former Israeli soldiers here in Florida all the time, and they'll tell you about friendships they have with Palestinians, and yet we cannot resolve this situation," said Sofian Abdelaziz Zakkout, the Gaza-born director of the Miami-based American Muslim Association of North America.

"But my problem with this wall they're putting up is that you end up punishing an entire people to stop five or six terrorists," Zakkout said. "This is being built over Palestinian land, disrupting farmland, and it punishes villages that depend on Israel for their economy."